Beyond the Style: The Importance of Determining Information in Note Taking

"Determining important ideas and information in text is central to making sense of reading and moving towards insight...Simply put, readers of nonfiction have to decide and remember what is important in texts they read if they are going to learn anything from them." (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000)

[Bold is mine]

In the work I do as a literacy coach, I get called in at certain times of the year to do lessons on the skills of note taking.  Usually, teachers want me to review the different types (Cornell, Concept Map, Outline, etc.).  Not very often, do I get teachers who want me to talk to students about the true skill of note taking -- determining what is important in the text. 

Surprisingly, many students who I work with in varying grade levels say that the most important "stuff" in a text is in bold, italics, or underline.  In their mind, the rest of the chapter can be left behind.  My response is what about all those maps, charts, graphs, formulas, pictures, and the context in which those words are found?

In the last couple classes I have been in, I've asked students how they take notes.  These are the two most common responses: I copy only the bold/italics/underline words and the definitions that follow OR I start from the beginning of the chapter/article/web page and write pretty much everything down.  Neither of these is a good strategy for truly understanding the material. 

For those who only write down the bold words, they are having a hard time understanding the context or concept attached to that word when it comes time for an assessment.  Those who write everything down say that they don't even bother to go back and look at their notes when it comes time for a test.  In both cases, students are taking down notes, but they aren't learning anything from them.  Many say they do the notes to get a homework grade, but not to learn what is in the reading. 

As I was about to start a series of mini-lessons on note taking in a Biology class, I came to a big realization.  How could the students take good notes IF they had no idea what they SHOULD be taking notes on?  I started trying to take notes from the beginning of a section on Photosynthesis and I became completely overwhelmed.  It became so much that I got up and left my office.  Upon returning, I decided I needed a different strategy.  If I (an adult who cared about taking decent notes) had no idea what was important in the chapter, how could the student figure it out without some form of modeling or scaffolding? 

Rather than give up, I opened up the textbook and looked at the Objectives for the section:

These were my way in.  If I could understand these objectives then in my mind I knew the important pieces of the section.  In fact, I would be a true Biology goddess because I would understand the material beyond just rote memorization.

•  Explain why almost all organisms depend on photosynthesis.
• Describe the role of chlorophylls and other pigments in photosynthesis.
• Summarize the main events of light reactions
• Explain how ATP is made during light reactions.
  

However, I needed a way to break down these objectives because they were still pretty dense.  I decided that I would look at the academic language first.  Another thing I found in my work recently with students is that they think all academic language means the same thing.  For example, one student told me that define is the same as discuss, but according to Christenbury, Gere, and Sassi define means "give an explanation of the term and supply enough detail to demonstrate understanding"; whereas, discuss means "consider important characteristics and include examples" (2005).  After I explained the difference, one student said, "No wonder I keep getting those questions wrong."

In class, the teacher and I modeled for students what academic language is and how to know what it is asking for in the question.  We asked students to box in the words so they could easily determine what the question was asking.

Next, I looked at the science words (or content language/vocabulary).  In class, we had students underline the science words.

Lastly, we asked the students for what we called focus words.  These were words that clarified what the objective (or question) might be asking -- how, why, depend, all, etc.  These words allows for us to clearly understand what we are supposed to learn from the objective. 

Once we broke down the language in the objective, we asked students to think about things they would need to know in order to answer the objective.  By writing up questions, the students were breaking down the objective into manageable pieces of information they would need to know.  Once they broke down the objective and understood the smaller pieces, they would then be able to put it all back together and explain in a thorough manner.

At this point, you may wonder what the students are taking notes on.  The answer is the questions.  We explained that the students would only take notes by answering the questions and then modeled how the process would look.  Below are a couple examples of the types of questions we asked using the objectives and how we looked at the language of the objective.

Example #1:

Bold = Academic Language

Underline = Science Language

Italics = Focus Words

Objective 1:  Explain why almost all organisms depend on photosynthesis.

Q(uestion)1:  What is photosynthesis?

• Process of taking light energy and turning it into other forms of energy
• Two Stages -- Light Reactions & Calvin Cycle

Q2:  How/Why do organisms (animals/plants) use photosynthesis?

• Autotrophs (create their own food/energy) -- light energy becomes chemical energy (carbohydrates)
• Heterotrophs (get their energy from other sources) -- need autotrophs to get energy/food.  (e.g., tree (autotroph) <-- caterpillar (heterotroph) <-- bird (heterotroph)

Q3:  Why is photosynthesis necessary?

This question prompted a lot of conversation because students agreed that they needed to know what photosynthesis is in order to answer this question, but they had already wrote the definition in Q1.  We explained that they could do one of two things -- write the definition again (if they are the type of learner who needs to write things down more than once to learn it) or make a note to look at Q1 (if they are someone who just needs to know where to look to get information. 

Modeling in class allowed for students to process how they learn. In addition, they also had to figure out what information they needed to take away from the text to learn the material.  We had some great conversations about whether or not we actually needed certain types of information or if we were just writing it down because it was interesting, but not necessarily important.

The other good thing about taking notes this way was that the teacher could tell the students which objectives she wanted them to take notes on to learn the information and which objectives she wanted to introduce to them in class first because of the complex nature of the material.  Having the teacher name which objectives they needed to take notes on took away students taking blanketed notes on the entire section or chapter.


Here is another example using Objective #2.

Objective #2: Describe the role of chlorophylls and other pigments in photosynthesis.

Q1:  What is chlorophyll(s)?

• Pigment located in the membrane of thylakid (students had done a pre-lesson on some vocabulary words using morphology so they were familiar with this term before reading chapter).  [NOTE: I have underlined many of the science words so you can see how heavy the language can be in both objectives and textbooks, but students did not need to do this in their notes (although, we did mention it might help them find information more easily).]
• Several types -- most common chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b

Q2:  What is a pigment?

• compound that absorbs light

Q3:  What are the other pigments?

• yellow, orange, brown carotenoids (accessory pigments) [Note: again, this vocabulary word was introduced in the pre-lesson using morphology.]

Q4:  What are their roles in photosynthesis?

• a and b -- both allow green light to be transmitted
• a -- directly involved in light reactions
• b -- help capture light energy (accessory pigment)
• carotenoids -- absorb colors that a cannot absorb to capture more energy in light.

We asked students to take notes on these two objectives using the questions created [NOTE: I filled in information from my experience taking notes.  Students may have had different variations of how they put information in their notes.]  The next day in class we asked students to share their impressions of taking notes this way versus their old way.  Many said that they took less notes AND that they had a better understanding of the material.

The last piece of information we shared with students around taking notes in ANY subject area is that if a teacher asks you to read something for their class without giving a clear purpose (or objective) that it is more than likely going to be impossible for them to know what their teacher (or the student) thinks is important from the text.  If this is the case, we suggested they look to see if the section has objectives or a statement of purpose.  If the reading doesn't have either of these, we suggested the student ask in a respectful manner the purpose (or objective) for reading the text.  Although we acknowledge that students will need to do this skill independently as they continue in their high school career and in any post-secondary work, we know that they are just learning how to do the strategy/skill and it would be unfair to do both at this time.  Students will likely work on deciphering purpose (or objectives) independently in the Biology class mentioned above as the year continues.

Resources

Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success by A.R. Gere, L. Christenbury, & K. Sassi (2005)

Modern Biology (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston)